Wealth and Economic Inequality

This report argues that wealth is an integral aspect of economic well-being. The authors combine income and net worth to demonstrate the importance of wealth inequalities in shaping overall economic inequality and defining the disparities among population subgroups.

Conventional measures of household economic well-being do not adequately
reflect the advantages of asset ownership or the disadvantages of financial
liabilities. The authors find that the picture of economic well-being in the
United States is quite different if the yardstick is their wealth-adjusted income
measure (WI) rather than the standard income measure.